Flutes

Albert Block (1926-2015) A wonderful woodwind doubler, Al had a distinguished career having played with the Sauter-Finegan Band, Benny Goodman, Boyd Raeburn, Artie Shaw, Raymond Scott, among many other big bands. He also participated in several legendary recordings including the Miles Davis/Gil Evans Sketches of Spain and Charlie Parker and Voices; played in numerous Broadway shows including the original productions of West Side Story, Gypsy, Cabaret, Sweet Charity, La Cage Aux Folles, etc; and was regarded as one of the better flute doublers of his generation. Al’s career was a successful one but not radically different from many of his New York colleagues who came along during the last great heyday of the music and recording industry in the 1950s/1960s. Beyond his musical prowess, what distinguished him was his ability to revel in the musical development of younger players and colleagues and to support them in any way possible. He loved being around up and coming doublers, especially those who played flute well and with a classical approach. He would often go to The Juilliard School (not far from his apartment) to hear the flute students give recitals.

Daniel Waitzman (b 1943) is an American flutist and composer. Born in Rochester, New York, Waitzman grew up in New York City, where he graduated from the High School of Music and Art in 1961. At Columbia College (B.A. 1965), he majored in Music. He received his MA in Musicology from Columbia University in 1968. He studied recorder with Bernard Krainis, Baroque Flute with Claude Monteux and Paul Ehrlich and modern flute with Samuel Baron, Harold Bennett, and Harry Moskovitz. He studied composition with Otto Luening, harmony and counterpoint with Charles Walton, Genevieve Chinn and Peter Westergaard, orchestration with Howard Shanet and musicology with Paul Henry Lang.
His professional career began in 1959, when he made the first of several recordings with his teacher, Bernard Krainis, at the age of 15. In 1962, he recorded a Frescobaldi Canzona with Krainis and lutenist Joseph Iodine on the Baroque one-keyed flute. This performance appeared on a recording entitled The Virtuoso Recorder. In 1965, he had a bell key (originally invented by Carl Dolmetsch) fitted to his recorder; and he began to develop a new technique for playing the bell-keyed recorder.He arranged three of J.S. Bach’s Organ Trio Sonatas for bell-keyed recorder and harpsichord,[9] and also arranged Bach’s E Major Violin Concerti for bell-keyed recorder and strings.
It was around this time that he became dissatisfied with the early music movement’s philosophical approach to the performance of the older repertoire, and also with the limitations of the one-keyed “Baroque” flute. Later, he published several critiques of the modern early music movement, including a book entitled Up from Authenticity, or How I Learned to Love the Metal Flute—A Personal Memoir. The original essay on which this book was based served as the subject for a feature article in The New York Times in 1990.
In 1971, Waitzman acquired an antique conical Boehm flute built ca. 1875 by Louis Lot. That same year, he made his formal début in Carnegie Recital Hall as a winner of the Concert Artists Guild Award, at which he performed on recorder, Baroque flute and conical Boehm flute. He has taught flute and recorder at Queens College, CUNY, and at Hofstra University.
In 1973-74, he persuaded the brothers Bickford and Robert Brannen to revive the manufacture of conical Boehm flutes. This project led to the establishment of the flute-making firm of Brannen Brothers. By 1976 Waitzman became convinced that it was possible to play the modern flute in a manner consistent with the aesthetic requirements of the older repertoire, using a type of embouchure very close to that of Boehm, the original inventor of the modern flute. He established himself as a performer on modern flute, and gave numerous recitals illustrating the history of the flute.
He has toured the USA and Canada as soloist and chamber musician. In 1976, he performed several of Vivaldi’s Piccolo Recorder concerti with Amor Artis at Alice Tully Hall. He has served as soloist and chamber musician on flutes and recorders with The Long Island Baroque Ensemble since 1974, and performed several concerts with the Bach Aria Group, including a Telemann Concerto for Recorder and Flute (with his teacher, flutist Samuel Baron).
In 1978, he published The Art of Playing the Recorder, a codification of the technique of both bell-keyed and keyless recorders. He had tried to convince recorder makers to offer a series of bell-keyed recorders expressly designed to take advantage of the bell key and had suggested that they undertake the development of a modernised recorder; and their failure to do so caused him to turn more and more to the Boehm flute, in both their conically-and cylindrically-bored forms, as his primary instrument.
In 1980, he was awarded an International Bach Society Performance Award. In 1987, he received a National Endowment for the Arts Solo Recitalist Fellowship Grant to give a recital in New York’s Alice Tully Hall. After pondering the current state of contemporary music, and the history of music since the Enlightenment, Waitzman turned his attention to the composition of new music in 1992, in the belief that a revival of what he considered the aesthetic ideals and highly affective approach of the old masters was long overdue.

Harold Bennett (1944-1985) Harold Bennett was principal flutist for the Metropolitan Opera orchestra from 1944 until his retirement in 1965. Raised in Wyoming, he graduated from the Curtis Institute of Music in 1935. For the next two years, he was first flautist of the National Symphony in Washington. He went on to play first flute in the Radio City Music Hall orchestra and the Pittsburgh Symphony, and, from 1940 to 1944, assistant first flute and piccolo in the Philadelphia Orchestra alongside his teacher, William Kincaid. Bennett also had an extensive teaching career, and joined the faculty of the Manhattan School of Music in 1962.